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for a while they sent websites over the tv signal. i forgot how it was called tho. you needed a tv tuner card to receive it on your pc
We do now too… it’s called WiFi 😅
WiFi being in the microwave range of the spectrum, surely it packs information much more densely and efficiently than lower wavelength frequencies like radio ever can.
But then WiFi can’t turn a goddamned corner and into another room ten yards away.Yeah I’m really confused why people keep saying it’s the same thing. It’s not, aside from being over-the-air at some point in the transmission.
I didn’t know about these radio broadcasts, but I did use to buy (pirated) games on cassette tape to load on my (unlicensed) ZX spectrum clone using my mini-boombox. Good times. :)
And Programs/Games came on Casettes :)
You cad cassettes? We had manually transcribe machine code from printed listings.
Just in case, no it’s not a joke.
Examle: Book - 101 BASIC games: https://archive.org/details/101basiccomputer0000davi
I have a 40 year old book about TI BASIC somewhere in the garage plus some magazines with games. I built a fantasy game and saved it to cassette.
For a ti-99/4a? Me too! It was my favorite thing (up until my dad bought a used 286 from work, then skipped a few generations and went right to a Pentium 133)
Same, except we had a cyrix processor
That’s the one! It’s also in the garage. Still worked a while back when I hooked it up through a few adapters.
I always dumpster dived for computers. My buddy showed me where to go and when so we’d upgrade every year together when one of the local junior colleges threw out a bunch of stuff. We were always a few years behind but we had more tech toys than folks on the edge of poverty had the chance to pick up back in those days.
I remember being a teen in the late 90s with some computers to use and some to sell and we ended up selling enough to both get Bigfoot drives. A couple of gigs was MASSIVE compared to the TI stuff we both started on.
He’s still got the tax software with the booklet and ads featuring Bill Cosby running around somewhere. He’s also got a tattoo of the motherboard of the TI-99/4a because he said without it he wouldn’t be where he is today. But he doesn’t like Bill Cosby anymore.
I always dumpster dived for computers.
We played the same game! Thats how I ended up with a DEC pizza box (multia with an alpha 166 processor) and a SparcStation. Then I’d take them over with me to the computer show (it was more like a flea market, its unfortunate they no longer exist) after I played with them to trade - thats how I was able to get my hands on a 1x (yes you read that right) CD burner.
Good times!
well yeah and because you don’t want to type the listing down all over again, you save it onto tape.
I did that a bit, for C64 games. I recall it being a mix of fun, tedious and extremely frustrating if there was even the slightest transmission interference while recording, then all you could do was wait for the next transmission and hope they went better.
and its predecessor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Computer_Network_System
I mean technically speaking if you’re connected on wifi you still are…
Came to say exactly this. 🤦🏼♂️ Kids these days.
Except for the non-broadcast transmission, storage methods, modulation, data rates, error correction, frequencies used, protocols, antennas, infrastructure, etc…
Like it’s not the same except for being “over the air”.
Boomers these days 🤦🏻♀️
- Gen Z
Didn’t some magazines ship software with plastic records that could be played on a conventional record player?
Yes, they are called flexi discs.
I wonder if the same people also think manipulating the tones to make free phone calls, as shown in Hackers, is also just a Hollywood myth. That shit was actually real.
Jokes on you nobody under the age of 50 has seen Hackers
I’m barely under 50 and never heard of this. And I watched mcgiver as a kid.
Phreaky
I only used cassette tape drives a couple times in 3rd grade before we upgraded to Apple IIs, but even then I knew to try putting a music tape in it.
It didn’t work.
I did the same thing with PlayStation games in CD players. And my PC. Sometimes they actually had music that played in a CD player, and sometimes cutscenes were just AVI files you could watch on a PC without playing the game!
Someone once argues with me on here that downloading updates and games in the late 90s wasn’t real. This is very gratifying lol.
Downloading updates for what?
Diablo is what I remember.
I never had this option. Typing in the whole thing manually from 4 pages of tiny print in BYTE magazine was my go to. Always had to be quick to save progress on cassette whenever mom came near with the vacuum cleaner
To be fair, I remember writing a choose your own adventure text based game in basic, and the only way to save and reload what you had programmed was via audio cassette.
TIL!
Yes, I’m in this picture, although it makes perfect sense in hindsight. It’s what I would have done if I wanted to get computing going in the 20th century.
It never really worked for me. I don’t recall ever being able to successfully use a cassette tape as a software storage medium.
